Remember the Dick Tracy 2-way wrist TV? WiMM Labs brought this capability one step closer with the WiMM One, an Android-based wrist device that retails for $199. In addition to serving as a watch (of course!) it can download applications from its own App Store, including a calendar that syncs to Google Calendar, a news reader, calculator, compass, pedometer, weather, timer, and stopwatch. The picture at right is just a simulaton (using the Gallery app), and the 667MHz ARM11 CPU is not quite enough to do real-time video, but with Bluetooth, WiFi, 2 GB of memory, we are pretty close.
It’s not exactly a beautiful piece of jewelry, coming in a black plastic case 32mm x 36mm, and the battery doesn’t even last for a full day, so this model is really just a developer platform, but it does have some cool features, such as a connection to your iPhone or Android phone that displays the incoming caller-ID along with a button for sending the call to voice mail. Just the thing for dealing with those calls that come in during a meeting.
WiMM will soon have some competition from Pebble, who recently raised $10M on Kickstarter and have already taken 85,000 orders for a watch to ship in 2013.
Chris Herot has been the founder and CTO or CEO of several Boston-area software companies, most recently Convoq/Zingdom Communications, where he provides strategic and technical advice to clients worldwide in the areas of audio, video, and social media.
Ever since he left what is now MIT’s Media Laboratory, he has been building interactive systems to enable people to create and communicate. What he enjoys most is learning about new technologies and finding ways to deploy them to solve human problems. To do this, he has started three companies and formed new entrepreneurial businesses within larger enterprises.
